Black List

or if it was only a dream.

He was just about to put it out of his mind and drift back into sleep when he suddenly heard the blast of a gunshot and knew he was no longer dreaming.

CHAPTER 22

Reaching for his weapon, Harvath rolled out of bed and hit the floor. What the hell was happening? he wondered. Seconds passed.

As he lay there, his ears strained for any sound that would explain what was going on. There were no additional shots.

But he knew what he had heard. The dogs had barked. A round had been fired. But how much time had passed between the two? He had no idea. It seemed like maybe a minute, but it could have been ten minutes, or more.

The barking and the gunshot had to be connected. There must be a predator nearby. And if there was, it raised a very important question—was it the four-legged variety, or the much more dangerous kind that came in on two?

Harvath waited, but no other sounds came. For all he knew, it was nothing—the Basque equivalent of a coyote or a mountain lion had wandered onto the property and had been shot. But what if that wasn’t what had happened?

Without a telephone or even a walkie-talkie with which to call down to the guard shack or reach out to Tello in the main house, Harvath had no choice but to investigate for himself.

He quickly got dressed and slipped soundlessly from the apartment. The night air was colder than when he had gone to bed, the fog thicker. He could barely see his hand in front of his face. He chose to leave the flashlight in his pocket. If someone was out there, somewhere in the fog, a flashlight would only draw them to him.

Stepping outside, the fog parted and almost seemed to pull him in. As the sheets enveloped his body, he strained for sounds, any sounds. There were none; not even sounds from the livestock.

They have a very large pasture, he reminded himself. Maybe the animals moved closer to the mountain and away from the ranch buildings when the fog was so dense. Maybe, or maybe there was another reason.

Any moment now, he would draw the attention of the dogs. They were used to Tello and his men, but Harvath was a stranger and they still reacted warily to him.

None of them were coming to investigate his presence outside the stables. Unless they were all huddled with the livestock on the far side of the pasture, something was wrong.

As he walked toward the main house, he kept his pistol in his coat pocket, his hand wrapped around its grip and his finger on the trigger. He wanted to be ready for any surprises, but he didn’t want to be one himself. Too often, the first and only thing people keyed in on was a gun. He didn’t want to get shot by one of Tello’s men.

Halfway to the house, he almost tripped over a pair of leather boots. He bent down through the fog and saw they belonged to one of the men he had nodded to before mounting the stairs to the apartment earlier.

Next to him was a lupara, and Harvath could smell that the weapon had recently been fired. He reached out to check the man’s pulse. He was still warm, but he didn’t have a heartbeat. When Harvath drew his fingers back, they were slick with blood. The man’s throat had been sliced from ear to ear. The front of his jacket was damp from exsanguination.

There was nothing he could do for him. The man was dead, and the ranch was under attack. He needed to focus on the threat.

Three questions spun through his mind as he moved away from the body and crept toward the main house. Who’s on the property? How many? And why had they come?

As soon as the last question popped into his mind, he had a bad feeling that he was going to get all his answers in short order.

Moving toward the main house, he wondered if the dead Basque had fired his shotgun at an intruder, or to warn his colleagues. Either way, it should have been like kicking a hornet’s nest. The fact that the ranch hadn’t immediately become a maelstrom of activity was a bad sign. From what he knew of Tello’s men, they were serious customers, not the type to run away from a fight.

When Harvath got to the side door he had been using to come and go, he found it ajar and all too inviting. He decided to move along the outside of the house and conduct a quick reconnaissance before going in.

Moving through the fog, he felt his way along the outer wall so as not to lose his way. The windows were dark and didn’t reveal anything inside.

Coming up to the corner of the house, he heard something and pulled up short. It sounded like someone choking back a cough, but he couldn’t be sure.

His Glock already out, Harvath reached into his other pocket and withdrew the flashlight. He heard the cough again, followed by groaning.

He held the flashlight in his left hand, up high and away from his body. Then, taking a deep breath, he exhaled and spun around the corner.

He pressed and released the tailcap switch on the flashlight. It was a drill he had done thousands of times in the SEALs and the Secret Service. The pulse of light lasted only for a second or less, but it was amazing how much information the brain could process in such a short amount of time.

Because of the fog, it was like peering through Vaseline, but he was able to see enough.

There were two men. They wore jeans, hiking boots, and windbreaker-style jackets that seemed ill-suited to the altitude and temperature. They were fit and had short, military-style haircuts. One man was sitting, while the other crouched next to him, pressing a bandage of some sort at the top of his leg near the groin. The wounded man held a silenced pistol, and even though Harvath couldn’t see it, he assumed the other man was armed as well.

That assumption was affirmed almost instantly when a hail of suppressed gunfire sent pieces of chipped stone from the wall near Harvath flying all around him.

Rapidly, Harvath retreated back around the corner. These weren’t Tello’s people. In fact, they reminded him a lot of the men from Paris.

Crouching down, he aimed his pistol around the corner and fired multiple times in rapid succession. The men had no cover and he intended to press his advantage.

He hadn’t affixed the suppressor to his own weapon, but even as the fog gobbled up much of the sound, the shots from the big .45 still boomed like claps of thunder.

Standing up, he pressed his back against the wall and changed magazines. When he was ready, he reached around the corner and let another vicious volley fly.

He drew the pistol back, changed magazines, and waited, his ear as near to the edge of the wall as possible, but there was no sound from the other side.

Cautious not to make any sound himself, he took a quick peek around the corner. Nothing happened. Either they hadn’t been able to see him through the fog, or they were no longer capable of returning fire. Harvath needed to find out.

After readying his weapon, he prepared to peek around the corner once more, but then thought better of it and stepped back. If they were waiting for him, that was the direction they’d expect him to come from. He reminded himself that the only first aid you give under fire is putting rounds on target. If the situation had been reversed, Harvath would have returned fire as he dragged his comrade to safety. Then he would have tried to flank his attacker.

As Harvath moved, his only thought was to neutralize the threat. Fifteen yards or so on, one of the men who had come to flank him stepped out of the fog and Harvath got his chance to take him out.

The man wasn’t expecting to see him and while his reaction was quick, Harvath was quicker.

Remembering the body armor the men in Paris wore, Harvath depressed his trigger and double-tapped the man’s forehead, dropping him to the ground dead.

He kicked the man’s weapon away and quickly patted him down. Just as he had suspected, the man was